A Very Easy Death Simone De Beauvoir Meaning
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....read by Hillary Huber
3 hours and 4 minutes
"Wow", I said to myself....'another book about death?/!.....
Joyce Carol Oats' book "Breathe"....should've been enough to last me at least another six months.
Plus, I just finished a newly published book, "Inseparable", by Simone de Beauvoir, associated with with death of a close friend.
I have no idea why I grabbed another 'death' book...
other than I wanted to read another book by Simone de Beauvoir.
This was a short three hour investm
....read by Hillary Huber
3 hours and 4 minutes
"Wow", I said to myself....'another book about death?/!.....
Joyce Carol Oats' book "Breathe"....should've been enough to last me at least another six months.
Plus, I just finished a newly published book, "Inseparable", by Simone de Beauvoir, associated with with death of a close friend.
I have no idea why I grabbed another 'death' book...
other than I wanted to read another book by Simone de Beauvoir.
This was a short three hour investment (engaging & interesting company while peddling on the spinnaker bike here at home).
Freebie for Audible members.
The voice narrator did an outstanding job reading!
Once again, it must be said: Simone was very talented.
Her reflective writing, is easy to connect with....
emotionally affecting, without being too sentimental.
This story about Simone's mother dying - (mother's short stay in the hospital) — was filled emotions & thoughts while facing the last days of life ....
and a look at their daughter/ mother relationship....
including the surprise 'harder' feelings after mum's death - more than expected.
Don't let the title fool ya. Death - at any age - is not "a very easy death.
Losing one's mother to cancer or any other reason is a very primal loss.
Well written & good! Quite engrossing!
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A retrospective and reflective review of the last weeks in the life of the author's aging mother.
Threaded throughout the chronicle of the progressive downhill course of the patient dying of cancer are flashbacks to the earlier relationships among the author, her sister, and their mother.
The course of the illness enables the reader to view many of the common problems that inform the doctor-patient, nurse-patient, and parent-child relati
Une Mort Tres Douce = A Very Easy Death, Simone de BeauvoirA retrospective and reflective review of the last weeks in the life of the author's aging mother.
Threaded throughout the chronicle of the progressive downhill course of the patient dying of cancer are flashbacks to the earlier relationships among the author, her sister, and their mother.
The course of the illness enables the reader to view many of the common problems that inform the doctor-patient, nurse-patient, and parent-child relationship.
The narrator, who is an accomplished writer, creates vivid and timely images of the hospital as experienced by the lay person.
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «مرگ آرام»؛ «مرگ بسیار آرام»؛ نویسنده: سیمون دو بوار؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش سال 1972میلادی
عنوان: مرگ آرام؛ نویسنده: سیمون دو بوار؛ مترجم: مجید امین موید؛ تهران، رز، 1349؛ در 108ص؛ چاپ دوم 1354؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، نگاه، سال1391؛ در 96ص؛ شابک 9789643516628؛ چاپ چهارم 1395؛ موضوع ناداستانهای نویسندگان فرانسه - سده 20م
عنوان: مرگ بسیار آرام؛ نویسنده: سیمون دوبووار؛ مترجم محمد مجلسی؛ تهران، دنیای نو، 1392، در 96ص؛ شابک 9789641720843؛
عنوان: مرگ بسیار آرام؛ نویسنده: سیمون دوبووار؛ مترجم فریبا اشرفی؛ تهران، ژوان، 1396، در 121ص؛ شابک 9786009810598؛
عنوان: مرگی بسیار آرام؛ سیمون دوبووار؛ مترجم سیروس ذکاء؛ ویراستاران مهدی نوری٬ محمدرضا ابوالقاسمی؛ تهران، ماهی، 1396؛ در 128ص؛ شابک 9789647948364؛ چاپ سوم 1396؛ چاپ چهارم 1397؛
مرگ بسیار آرام کتابی است از «سیمون دوبوار»، فیلسوف اگزیستانسیالیست و فمینیست «فرانسه»، که نخستین بار در سال 1964میلادی نشر شده، دوبوآر در این کتاب یادمانها و احساسات اعضای خانواده اش را در هفته های پایانی زندگی مادرشان بنگاشته اند؛ رمان «مرگ بسیار آرام» را می‌توان گزارشی از آخرین روزهای زندگی مادر «سیمون دوبوآر» دانست؛ مادر لیز میخورد، بر زمین می‌افتد، در بیمارستان و حین مداوای شکستگی، پی می‌برد به سرطان مبتلا شده است؛ مادر «دوبوار» شش هفته بعد از دنیا می‌روند؛ نویسنده در این اثر ادبی، از احساسات خود، خواهر و مادرش در خلال آن روزها می‌نویسند؛ ایشان در این کتاب در باب ماجرای مرگ مادر و با نگاه فلسفی به مرگ سخن می‌گویند
نقل از متن ترجمه جناب مجید امین موید: (فردای آن روز، دهان مامان هنوز کج، و طرز گفتارش در هم بود، پلک‌های بلندش چشمانش را می‌پوشاند، و ابروانش لرزشی داشت؛ بازوی راستش که بیست سال پیش، هنگام افتادن از دوچرخه شکسته بود، بدجوری جوش خورده بود، تصادف اخیر نیز به بازوی چپش صدمه رسانده بود؛ به زحمت می‌توانست آن‌ها را تکان دهد؛ خوشبختانه با توجه دقیقی پرستاری‌اش می‌کردند؛ اتاقش به باغی دور از هیاهوی کوچه مشرف بود، تختخواب را جابجا کرده، و آن را به درازای دیوار، و موازات پنجره، قرار داده بودند، چنانکه تلفن دیواری در دسترس او بود؛ نیم‌تنه اش متکی به بالش بود، و ازاین‌رو بیشتر نشسته بود تا دراز کشیده، برای آنکه شُش‌هایش خسته نشوند، تشک لاستیکی‌اش که به دستگاهی برقی وصل بود، لرزشی داشت، و او را ماساژ می‌داد، و بدین ترتیب، می‌شد از زخم و سیاه شدن بدن، جلوگیری کرد؛ هر روز صبح متخصص ماساژ، ساق‌هایش را به حرکت وامی‌داشت؛ به نظر می‌رسید خطراتی که «بوست» گوشزد می‌کرد، رفع شده است؛ مامان با صدایی کمی خواب‌آلود، به من گفت پرستار گوشت غذایش را خرد کرده، و در خوردن غذا، وی را یاری نموده بود، و البته خوراک‌ها عالی بودند، حال آنکه در «بوسیکو» به وی سیب زمینی داده بودند؛ خیلی بیشتر از دیروز حرف می‌زد؛ ماجرای دو ساعت اضطراب را، که کف اتاق می‌خزیده، و از خود می‌پرسیده آیا موفق می‌شود به سیم دست یابد، و دستگاه تلفن را پیش خود بکشد، پیوسته تکرار می‌کرد: «روزی به خانم مارشال که او هم تنها زندگی می‌کند، گفتم: خوشبختانه تلفن هست؛ و او جوابم داد: تازه باید دست آدم بهش برسد.» مامان با لحنی حکیمانه، چند بار کلمات اخیر را، تکرار و اضافه کرد: «اگر خودم را به تلفن نرسانده بودم کارم تمام بود.»؛)؛ پایان
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 03/06/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
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We have fears in ourselves, but also unusual forms of courage.
Sometimes it becomes the mission of writers to dig deep for us as well, those who still stand on the sidelin
We have fears in ourselves, but also unusual forms of courage.
Sometimes it becomes the mission of writers to dig deep for us as well, those who still stand on the sidelines, and are afraid to express in words what we might discover if we looked inside ourselves, so well hidden behind our heart, somewhere in a boundless depth.
There she look de Beauvoir, as if there - in the darkness, she discovered a kind of light that helped her reveal what could no longer remain hidden. One such theme is Death, a penetration into reality that not everyone dares to write about. And maybe it's not even about daring either, but about not having a choice.
" A Very Easy Death " becomes almost an allegory, if it were not at the same time under the sign of autobiography. Allegory only in the sense in which what is seen as an analysis of a progression of a disease gives the impression that it can help, through this distancing of the narrator from the narrative.
De Beauvoir's entire confrontation with her mother's death seems to have entrusted to the hands of a fine observer, a psychologist who does not tell a story, but is in the middle of an essential research. The profoundly moving, day by day recounting of her mother's death revealed to me the power of compassion when it is allied with acute awareness- raising intelligence. A true masterpiece.
When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets.
One of my favorite reads of 2018.
Brutal Honesty. Simone de Beauvoir recounts the last thirty days of her mother's life. The fall. The hospitalization. The medications. The misdiagnosis. The diagnosis. The cancer.
If you've ever had the experience of watching someone you love slowly die then you will almost certainly feel an empathetic kinship with Simone. I know I did. I found her misgivings eerily familiar.
When propriety dictates
"When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets."Brutal Honesty. Simone de Beauvoir recounts the last thirty days of her mother's life. The fall. The hospitalization. The medications. The misdiagnosis. The diagnosis. The cancer.
If you've ever had the experience of watching someone you love slowly die then you will almost certainly feel an empathetic kinship with Simone. I know I did. I found her misgivings eerily familiar.
When propriety dictates that we perform surgery on the terminally ill, are we doing so for their benefit or for our own? Are we saving them? And if so, from what? Are we buying them an extra month or two so we can say those things we should have already said? Is their prolonged infirmity an act of mercy in their best interest or is it obliquely (or obviously) selfish?
There was a point in my grandmother's Alzheimer's, in my Aunt Kay's cancer, in my Uncle Dean's covid, when I had to ask, "Is it time to loosen our grip and say 'I love you' and 'goodbye'?"
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The collection aims to present an array of well-known women writers' memories of their mothers depicted in "positive tones and vivi
I encountered A Very Easy Death twice before actually reading it. The two encounters amounted to radically different readings of the same text. My first encounter with A Very Easy Death was not exactly a reading but an abridgment of the book that appeared in an anthology entitled Mothers: Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Literary Daughters edited by Susan Cahill.The collection aims to present an array of well-known women writers' memories of their mothers depicted in "positive tones and vivid colors" (xii). The section from Beauvoir's book, recounts her mother's death from cancer. Despite the general excellence of the anthology, I later found the abridgment of Beauvoir's text amounted to a bowdlerization: the less positive aspects of their mother-daughter relationship, and Beauvoir's more explicit descriptions—the body parts, the private parts—had all been removed. The rest of the book, describing her mother's brutal illness and death, is also omitted. Only the final pages of the book, where Beauvoir writes movingly of her mother's death and death in general, are again included.
My second encounter with A Very Easy Death occurred when reading an article by Alice Jardine entitled "Death Sentences: Writing Couples and Ideology." It was Jardine's article that prompted me to go back to Beauvoir's original text, because none of the quotes Jardine cited had appeared in the anthologized version of A Very Easy Death. Unlike Susan Cahill, who edited the anthology to conform to more sentimental notions of motherhood, Alice Jardine focuses specifically on how Beauvoir's mother is "buried in and by narrative" (93), on Beauvoir's clinically explicit descriptions of her mother's cancerous, decomposing body. In particular, Jardine cites the passage where Beauvoir has walked into the hospital room and suddenly sees her mother exposed by her open hospital nightdress.
In Jardine's quotation the dialogue between Beauvoir and her mother is deleted. By deleting the dialogue and the introduction to the incident from her mother's perspective ("Maman had an open nightdress on and she did not mind that her wrinkled belly. . . ), Jardine specifically fore-grounds the body of Beauvoir's mother. "Seeing my mother's sex organs" is far more stark than Patrick O'Brien's translation (done for the l965 English edition): "The sight of my mother's nakedness . . ." (19). Jardine demonstrates that Beauvoir exposes her mother's body in words in order "to evacuate the dangerous body, the poisoned body, so that she [Beauvoir:] may continue to write" (94) but then revalorizes her mother as phallic when she dreams, lying next to her mother in bed, that her mother has become Sartre. In short, Jardine focuses on Beauvoir's descriptions of her mother's body while the Cahill anthology deletes the body in order to present a positive mother-daughter relationship. The body of the text—literally Beauvoir's mother's body—becomes the site of critical blindness and/or insight. The body is either seen or absent and the text has been variously called a masterpiece, indelicate, honest, moving, beautiful, and brutal.
A Very Easy Death arouses controversy because it is textually irritating. It is neither a touching memorial or a caustic dissection of her mother's body. Yet the intersection of clinical discourse and emotional asides—a clash of logos and pathos—makes a reader uneasy. A mother's body, particularly a mother's dying body, may be eulogized or sentimentalized, but certainly not made sexually explicit. When Beauvoir refers to her mother's bald pubis—her sex organs—she breaks taboos.
In "Stabat Mater," Julia Kristeva traces the taboos surrounding the mother's body back to the Virgin Mary: the original mother in Western culture. In short, the sight catches Beauvoir by surprise and forces her to confront all her ambivalence about the maternal body in general and her mother's body in particular. Beauvoir's first reaction to the sight of her mother's sex organs is to turn away. Conversely, the body of the mother, specifically the mother's vagina, underscores our helplessness, reminding us that we did not spring into the world as little gods. When Beauvoir "sees" her mother, the site of origin, she also realizes she is seeing the end, for it is only in the extremities of death that her mother would cease being ashamed of her body. This time, however, in opposition to her portrayal of her mother in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Beauvoir attempts to reconstruct her mother's history, re-visioning her mother as a daughter, so that her mother may be understood as victim as well as perpetrator. Importantly, Beauvoir does not withhold the unpleasant. She still finds her mother somewhat stupid, often silly, and similarly refuses to idealize her disease—her mother's cancer is described in relentless, clinical detail.
What Beauvoir starts in A Very Easy Death she does not finish. The complex representation of her mother gets somewhat cast aside at the end of the book when Beauvoir retreats into general comments about death. Yet, without sentiment, Beauvoir attempts to really see her mother, and in seeing her, sees herself. Beauvoir is also forced, in caring for her mother, to radically shift perspectives. As opposed to the more gradual course Kathleen Woodward outlines, where a woman is first "daughter to her mother," then "mother to her daughter," and finally, "as she grows older . . . becomes mother to her mother" ("Aging" 96), Beauvoir, childless, switches directly from a daughter to her mother to the mother of her mother. Moreover, in this text Beauvoir crafts an autobiographical work where the portrayal of the daughter is not accomplished by simplifying and/or effacing the mother. Instead, Beauvoir's stark representation of her mother exceeds generic expectations, frays accepted cultural margins, and calls into question what may, can, and should be written about mothers.
From a prior publication
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Simone De Beauvoir
I picked Beauvoir's this memoir on her mother's death while I was grieving. I felt deeply for Beauvoir, her sister, and the suffering of her mother. Beauvoir's "When someone you love dies you pay for the sin of outliving her with a thousand piercing regrets." reminds me of my own regrets. This book was overwhelming at times, an emotional ride.
Recommended!
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"There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into q
Certainly more impactful than Handke's; of too-different a timbre than Roth's; toward a completely different end than Knausgård's; etc…de Beauvoir's memoir and meditation upon a parent's death is, unsurprisingly, unflinchingly honest. But that's why one reads de Beauvoir, no? Sartre might be mentioned a few times, but that bastard's entire corpus doesn't touch this:"There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation."
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Simone De Beauvoir
I'm just glad that I read this book before my mother dies.
One of the things that I learnt from this book was that if I wanted to go to Paris and didn't want to meet any French people, the best time to go would be August.I'm just glad that I read this book before my mother dies.
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In the first volume of de Beauvoir's memoirs, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, written when she was in her forties, covered the first 23 years of her life. Her experiences and insights helped me understand my relationship with my mother. We both fought against our mothers' protective and restraining method
Have you ever spent the last days of your mother's life by her side? I have. This memoir of that experience by my much read and much admired Simone de Beauvoir hit me hard but not unpleasantly.In the first volume of de Beauvoir's memoirs, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, written when she was in her forties, covered the first 23 years of her life. Her experiences and insights helped me understand my relationship with my mother. We both fought against our mothers' protective and restraining methods of raising a girl.
Simone's mother fell dangerously ill in 1963 when Simone was 55 years old. Her mother went to hospital, nursing home and finally into hospice care when inoperable cancer was found. Mine had two major strokes from which she could not regain enough strength to care for herself and eventually passed away 10 years ago, also in hospice though not due to cancer. She declined any sort of life support and my sisters and I honored her wishes. I was with her everyday for 3 months, the last 5 weeks of which I was her primary caregiver at her home.
Reading A Very Easy Death was like going through it all again: my mom's bewilderment at being so reduced, watching over her in the hospital and rehab facility where some bad things happened with doctors, nurses and techs, then feeling I had failed to save her when she finally passed.
However, the other thing I shared with Simone is a coming to peace with who my mother was and understanding her so much more deeply. We were no longer at odds in those final months, a huge gift to both of us.
Simone de Beauvoir is a brilliant writer. She made the concerns, the exasperations, the humorous moments, the grief and relief, so real. This book captures the details, the essence of that passage in life with complete honesty. I know it is honest because I have been there.
I wish I had had this book with me in 2009.
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True to the Sartrean existentialism that Beauvoir made her own in Pyrrhus et Cinéas (1944) and Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (1945), her recollections of her mother's final days serve for her as an occasion to reflect upon the familiar themes of freedom, subjectivity, selfhood, and the meaning of human existence. Similarly foregrounded are some of the feminist themes that Beauvoir had explored in her best-known work, the two-volume Le deuxième sexe (1948): on the one hand, the hospital provides an ideal setting for her to contemplate what Carol Gilligan would later call a feminist Ethics of Care; on the other, the passing away of a loved one not only provides the opportunity, but gives rise to the need, to look at her life as a whole and, in this case, examine how it was shaped by the norms, pressures, expectations and hardships that characterize women's experience in the early-to-mid 20th Century.
"All men are mortal; Socrates is a Man; therefore Socrates is mortal". Which student of philosophy as not come across this simple syllogism in an introductory course on Logic or Critical Thinking? But has the student grasped the full meaning of the propositions contained therein? Or has it been lost in the "luxurious arrogance of a world where death has no place?" (p. 92). Has routinized perception occluded the phenomenon of death that our talk of it has degenerated to the point of being little more than a play of empty concepts, bereft of any real significance? For the authentic confrontation with mortality, Beauvoir remarks, has a way of breaking down routines and preconceptions:
I realized that my mother's accident had shocked me much more than I had anticipated. I wasn't quite sure why. It had wrested her from her frame, her role, from the fixed images in which I had imprisoned her. I recognized her in this bedridden woman, but I recognized neither the pity nor the sort of dismay that she aroused in me. (p. 26-27).
There is, it seems, a certain incommensurability between the detached third-person perspective of the observer — the Aristotelian philosopher composing his syllogism, the scientific researcher recording his data — and the first-person perspective of the human being — the angst (Heidegger), the anguish (Sartre), the fear and trembling (Kierkegaard) of the subject faced with the inescapable question of its own existence.
In a sense, the incommensurability between the subjective and the objective — the aphasic shocks between these irreconcilable viewpoints — represents the focal point for the various lines of thought explored by Beauvoir in this brief memoir. It is the conflict between Beauvoir herself and her mother's physician, Dr. N., for whom the patient — the mother, the wife, the woman with all her lived experience — is little more than "the object of an interesting experiment" (p. 62). It is the tension between the solicitude of the daughter grappling with the humanity of prolonging a life of suffering (p. 35) and the deontological code of the doctor who stubbornly insists upon "doing what he must" (p. 63). It underscores both our horror in the face of the human body robbed of its significance and reduced to a set of causal processes — "no longer [a] mother but a poor tortured body" (p. 64) — and our restlessness at the cold inhumanity of a hospital where, "agony and death are daily occurrences" (p. 101) and where, "as in a hotel, the room need[s] to be cleared out before noon" (p. 112).
Early reviewers of the book were quick to seize upon the previously unsuspected tenderness and sensitivity intimated by Beauvoir in Une mort très douce. They are not wrong. However, these seem to me significantly less prominent than the sadness and bitterness that pervades her writing. From the portrait of her mother as a woman repressed by "the constraints and privations that she imposed upon herself" (p. 44) and forced to live vicariously through her children to the depiction of the modern hospital as a Kafkaesque purgatory where life ends before death has the time to set in — "Mother sighed: 'Today I didn't live at all'" (p. 93) — Beauvoir's writing throbs with the dull ache of a woman faced with the gratuitous injustice of a lifetime of wasted potential and asking "À quoi bon ?": "What good does it do?"
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Simone de Beauvoir raises the same questions that I did those two years ago. When do you stop viewing your loved ones as living and more as a corpse? When does their suffering outweigh their living? Ca
For all fictitious books that I've read and felt my life was eerily similar to, there've been even fewer non-fiction books that I've felt the same way about. But A Very Easy Death catapulted me back two years ago, when there was so much suffering in a hospital bed that I was all too privy to.Simone de Beauvoir raises the same questions that I did those two years ago. When do you stop viewing your loved ones as living and more as a corpse? When does their suffering outweigh their living? Can you trust doctors to prolong their lives even if their lives are wracked with more surgeries and intensive care? And how does one's family dynamic change, to mother one's mother? Of course, there's no answer here, and every single person will have a different answer. But de Beauvoir and my answers were similar, and perhaps that's because we've both dealt with a situation in which someone enters a hospital for one reason and is retained there for a much more serious and potential fatal other reason. (Oh, your mom came in for a broken hip, Mme de Beauvoir? We'll just keep her for cancer...)
Not only that, but the questions surrounding one's own life comes up: when do you allow yourself to stop visiting your loved one as much (because you also have a life of your own that you can't exactly put on hold)? How do you account for sibling relationships, and how those relationships were affected by your own mother's relationship with her siblings?
When situations like these arise, these are some of the hard questions that might come to mind. To parse through them all is difficult, and I now completely understand why and how Simone de Beauvoir wrote a book about it. And I'm utterly thankful she did. In my experience, I find that her anecdotes and her logic and her worries and her fears all fall into place perfectly, are all logical and understandable. I found comfort in knowing that it wasn't just me thinking these things--and of course it couldn't just be me, but death and hospitalization is such a taboo topic.
If you need some philosophy in your life, or feminist perspectives on one's mother's dying and death, this is certainly the text for you. It doesn't hold back.
Review cross-listed here!
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*sighs*
Seriously, Simone, I don't know where this is going. It started to feel as if m
An excellent way to remember Mlle de Beauvoir's precision as well as how an excellent psychologist she is. For my part, having read her works has so far ameliorated, altered and at times recuperated my womanhood, adolescence and, inarguably, my relationship with selves. Now, with this book, she happens to have contributed to the relationship with my mother, to my understanding of it, and a great deal as well.*sighs*
Seriously, Simone, I don't know where this is going. It started to feel as if my ordeal, my war clouds and fallout, motives and ardour are just some footnotes to your works. I don't like this. I WANT THEM BACK GODDAMMIT.
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An honest, intimate account of watching a close relative whither away through constant pain, constant suffering. In being confronted with death, we understand our desire to live and the meaning in our lives.
I wish I had read this earlier.
One of my favourite passages:
"The sight of my mother's nakedness had jarred me. No body existed less for me: none existed more. As a child I had love it dearly; as an adolescent it had filled me with an uneasy repulsion: all this was perfectly ordinary course of things and it seemed reasonable to me that her body should retain its dual nature, that it should be both repugnant and holy - a taboo. But for all that, I was astonished at the violence of my distress."
We spend thirty days with Simone beside her mother's bed, observing her mother's decline and listening to her process her thoughts as she does so.
I appreciate De Beauvoir's ability to not only convey her emotions throughout the pages, but also to analyse and philosophise throughout, but not unfeelingly. Another few lines that I loved; "Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death."
Amen to that.
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The memoir is extremely difficult emotionally to read, and towards the middle it gets exhausting, when she details her mother's last weeks of life. But you read on, as these passages lead to her death, and some deep insights into the mother-daughter relationship.
"I had grown very fond of this dying woman. As we talked in the half-darkness I assuaged an old unhappiness; I was renewing the dialogue that had been broken off during my adolescence and that our differences and our likenesses had never allowed us to take up again. And the early tenderness that I had thought dead for ever came to life again, since it had become possible for it to slip into simple words and actions."
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As you get older and your loved ones get older, you can't but help thinking about death and dying and this is a good example o
Excellent description of Simon de Beavoir's mother's last days and death. As always, Simone de Beauvoir writes very honestly and generously of what you know from her other books, was an incredible difficult time for her. Unsurprisingly she had a difficult relationship with her mother and this book shows how important this period of her mother's dying was for both of them.As you get older and your loved ones get older, you can't but help thinking about death and dying and this is a good example of not an easy, but a good death. Highly recommend it.
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Death brought about a great transformation in her mother's life. she was a woman who was passionate about life. she became much more serious about living during the last days. she loved, care This book was a difficult read. it is a slow and traumatic journey that the reader takes with Simone during her mother's last days(a cancer patient). Simone had a strained relation with her mother as she rebelled young against her mother's rigid catholicism. Their relation froze into silence for a long time.
Death brought about a great transformation in her mother's life. she was a woman who was passionate about life. she became much more serious about living during the last days. she loved, cared, abandoned her prejudices and started living in harmony with her desires. These changes lead to closeness and warmth between the mother and daughter.
Simone is very critical of bourgeois marriage. her mother couldn't self actualize in the marriage. her needs always took a backseat as her husband was the patriarch who dominated in the relationship. she could pursue her wishes to read, travel and socialize only after his death.
Class is reflected in the book frequently. Her mother's death wasn't as horrifying as people belonging to the lower classes as she had access to a private nursing facility with timely, healthy meals and care by nurses and her relatives.
Simone attacks the medical view on death as merely a statistic where the patient is treated objectively as a diseased body. she states that "There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man, his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation."
The problematic aspect for me was that there was not much talk about the patient's right to know about her condition and to make the decision for herself regarding euthanasia or continuing palliative care. The doctors took these decisions dictatorially. ...more
Her mother was Catholic Christian, in virtue of which, among things, her love skills were high level. De Beauvoir remembers a very warm and loving mother in her early childhood, this changed when De Beauvoir as a young teenager became an atheist. Subsequently their relationship became more strained, cold and distant and they lost a previous intimacy; which is first regained to some extent when the mother is dying and when De Beauvoir gains a new-found respect for her otherwise intellectually--IQ wise; whether or not that is a reductionistic measuring device--inferior mother in how she confronts and tackles her own death in the hospital. Another reason that De Beavoir's mother wasn't always an optimal mother to her and her sister was that she herself had been badly treated by her own mother etc. etc.
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Because it says that 2 Stars are an ok Book and this was IMHO an OK book. I would have never picked it myself but a friend of mine recommended and lent it to me. I just knew it's a real story written from a daughter about her mothers dying days.
I didn't like the writing style at all and struggled through the first half of the book because I didn't want to give up on it. I got used to the writing and found myself liking the book better in the second half though I was still
Why I just gave 2 Stars?Because it says that 2 Stars are an ok Book and this was IMHO an OK book. I would have never picked it myself but a friend of mine recommended and lent it to me. I just knew it's a real story written from a daughter about her mothers dying days.
I didn't like the writing style at all and struggled through the first half of the book because I didn't want to give up on it. I got used to the writing and found myself liking the book better in the second half though I was still glad when I finished it. I couldn't cope with the text being just a monologue. I would have preferred a few dialogues to liven up the story but I think it's intended to have this numb feeling that you experience when coping with too emotional situations we better want to blend out.
It was a sad and touching story but mostly irritating.
I was reminded of my grandmothers last living days. She lost her battle to cancer and all those images of her came back to me while reading this book.
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Simone de Beauvoir est née à Paris le 9 janvier 1908. Elle fit ses études jusqu'au baccalauréat dans le très catholique cours Désir. Agrégée de philosophie en 1929, elle enseigna à Marseille, à Rouen et à Paris jusqu'en 1943. C'est L'Invitée (1943) qu'on doit considérer comme son véritable début littéraire. Viennent ensuite Le sang des autres (1945), Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946), Les Mandarins (prix Goncourt 1954), Les Belles Images (1966) et La Femme rompue (1968).
Simone de Beauvoir a écrit des mémoires où elle nous donne elle-même à connaître sa vie, son œuvre. L'ampleur de l'entreprise autobiographique trouve sa justification, son sens, dans une contradiction essentielle à l'écrivain : choisir lui fut toujours impossible entre le bonheur de vivre et la nécessité d'écrire ; d'une part la splendeur contingente, de l'autre la rigueur salvatrice. Faire de sa propre existence l'objet de son écriture, c'était en partie sortir de ce dilemme.
Outre le célèbre Deuxième sexe (1949) devenu l'ouvrage de référence du mouvement féministe mondial, l'œuvre théorique de Simone de Beauvoir comprend de nombreux essais philosophiques ou polémiques.
Après la mort de Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir a publié La Cérémonie des adieux (1981) et les Lettres au Castor (1983) qui rassemblent une partie de l'abondante correspondance qu'elle reçut de lui. Jusqu'au jour de sa mort, le 14 avril 1986, elle a collaboré activement à la revue fondée par Sartre et elle-même, Les Temps Modernes, et manifesté sous des formes diverses et innombrables sa solidarité avec le féminisme.
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Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123942.A_Very_Easy_Death
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